I am constantly amazed at the very strange places Internet
research takes you.

Dr. G has re-entered my life. He is preparing a midlife
women's seminar, to be presented in March, and has asked me to design a web
site for him.

This will be the second web site that I will have designed
for him. He has a high-priced web site for the office, but when he
decided to advertise his ...uh... plastic surgical procedures (knowing that
Dr. G is a gynecologist, feel free to let your imagination run wild), he
asked if I would design a web site specifically for that business.

I'm not sure if it was because he felt I would charge him
less than the astronomical prices he was being charged for the office web
site, or if it was because he felt more comfortable sharing the photos he
wanted posted on the site with me, since I'd been at the business end of the
exam table. I tend to think it was the money aspect, tho. I
doubt that Dr. G is uncomfortable about anything that has to do with the
human body.

Anyway, I took the day off from driving down to be
with my mother and spent the day working on the web site. The seminar
is going to be a collaboration among several women's health practitioners
and I already don't like one of them, sight unseen.

All the others have submitted bios and photos for the web
site; this particular person has submitted what looks like a copy of a
degree, a tiny personal statement and a photo which I am to download from a
web site (which is half the size of the other photos). From this I am
to write the bio myself and try to make the biography page consistent with
the other bio pages.

In doing research on this person for the bio, I came across a
publication which dealt with all areas of women's health. I was intrigued
because at least part of the study seems to have been done among American
Catholic nuns.

There was an absolutely fascinating chapter on the history of
masturbation ("Self pleasure or sin?") in which I learned the following:

It was thought that certain food products could help quell
the urge to masturbate. J.H. Kellogg produced corn flakes for that reason.
Sylvester Graham created the Graham cracker with a similar purpose in mind.
Both these men became popular sexual advisers. Graham prescribed that males
eat grains and wheat rather than meat. Further, he advised sleeping on hard
wooden beds and taking strenuous exercise to ward off the dire results of
masturbation.

Now tell me, would you turn to the guy who created graham
crackers for advice on your sex life?

(This does, however, explain a line in Oliver!, where
Mr. Bumble, who has been called to the funeral parlor to which he delivered
Oliver because the boy was running rampant. Bumble discovers that
Oliver had been given a speck of meat the night before and explains the
erratic behavior by scolding "MEAT, Madam! MEAT!")

In reading through
this chapter the
thing that leaps out over and over again is the ridiculous obsession human
beings have on sex, sexuality, and its various manifestations. In American
society today we are appalled at the barbaric practice of removal of the
clitoris by some African societies and yet this very thing was advised in
this country in the mid 1880s to cure the "disease" of masturbation, which
was believed to cause "vexing mental disorders" in women, a procedure
recommended up through the middle 1930s.

Between 1897 and 1940, eleven editions of Holt's "Disease and
Infancy in Childhood" were published, all of which condemned masturbation as
harmful and advised things like mechanical restraints and corporal
punishment for young children caught touching themselves.

All of this made me think of the kind of conflicting sexual
attitudes in my own family. My father made everything about sex seem
like the dirtiest thing in the world. I remember the day I was home
sick and he sat on my bed and decided to explain the birds and bees to me,
reminding me over and over again that touching myself in any way was "self
abuse" and was a terrible sin.

Contrast that with an absolutely delightful conversation I
once taped among 3 of my aunts and my mother (a tape which my mother has
lost....or destroyed!) and their laughter about sex, how useful one aunt
found a clothes dryer, and other household appliances.

My father's repressive attitude about sex (though he had no
reluctance to share with me photos of nude women sunbathing by his pool,
after my parents' divorce) and my determination that he was not going to
imprint those feelings on my kids that he did on me was actually the thing
that was at the root of our last argument, following which he attempted to
disown me, but died before he was able to get the paperwork filed.

Our culture is so screwed up about sex (pun intended).
With all the taboos and the amount of Kellogg's cereal on the grocery
shelves, it's amazing that overpopulation is such a problem.